Valve has been sending notifications to customers who purchased From Dust on Steam offering refunds on the god game over its DRM requiring online authentication, reports Rock, Paper, Shotgun. This follows indications last week that some customers were able to get such refunds which were not confirmed at the time, and Monday's announcement that this aspect of the game's DRM will be removed by a patch within a couple of weeks. Here's the email reproduced on RPS:

Ubisoft has just announced that they are working on a patch that will eliminate the need for any online authentication for From Dust. The patch will release in approximately two weeks.

If you don't want to wait or the patch or if you haven't played the game, per Ubisoft's request, we will issue refunds for this title.

If you would still like your purchase of From Dust to be refunded, please reply to this ticket.

You have no idea whether it does or not. You THINK it does, but that's not cold hard fact. You have no numbers one way or the other.

And for every supposed person that won't "casually" pirate/copy the game or OS or whatever (that then goes out and actually buys it, another BIG "if"), there's also a supposed person (and in many cases more than supposed, since I know for a fact that I personally have stopped buying Ubisoft titles, as have quite a few others here on Blues) that ignores said game/OS specifically BECAUSE of the DRM crap.

So Ubisoft might be correct in saying it's reduced piracy. What they fail to ever provide is correlating data in how much their DRM has also reduced SALES.

Heck, they might have reduced piracy by 80,000,000 copies. But if in the end they sell 100 fewer copies, I'm going to safely say that it's not doing their bottom line any favors.

But they're so fucking retarded they probably never even bother to check. They just see fewer people leeching a torrent, so they pop the bubbly and celebrate all around. That thousands of copies are left in the stores because people refuse to put up with their DRM is likely never even noticed.

nin wrote on Aug 24, 2011, 10:44:I have to seriously wonder how much beating up UBI will take before they relent on their DRM. It seems like it's been nothing by a black eye for them.

Here's how Ubisoft responds to complaints about their DRM.

*fingers in ears* LALALALALALALALALALALALALAALLA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!!

Fucking morons.

Take Ubisoft and its insistent raping of PC gameplayers with shitty ports and horseshit DRM. Then compare this to Eidos and Deus Ex, which is a proper PC port (SSAO and related mouse issues notwithstanding, they'll fix that,) and doesn't feature always-on DRM. I really hope people will reward Eidos for releasing such an awesome PC game.

That in no way, (and believe me, Ubi, MS, whoever, know that it) ends piracy, but they do know that it cuts it down. Let's take Windows Activation - It came out to stop 'casual copying', not piracy... Piracy is a big business (even hinted at organized crime levels), so it's not going to get stopped by some fancy schmancy DRM 'phone home' scheme, because all that information is part of the package installed on user's PCs...

They keep taking the position that "its effective at reducing piracy" which I think is more like "its effective at reducing interest in the products" more than anything else. I don't buy or pirate any Ubisoft titles with this DRM.